


Look at me, I swear by your God

by quarter_life_crisis



Category: Bleach
Genre: Grimmichi Secret Santa 2020, M/M, Possibly Pre-Slash, Post-Canon, Q asked for hanukkah fic, an attempt was made, but hes a very supportive boyfriend, ichigo kurosaki is not a worldly man, im filing this under m/m but its very vague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28256928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quarter_life_crisis/pseuds/quarter_life_crisis
Summary: After an innocuous item in a thrift store sparks unexpected familiarity from Grimmjow, Ichigo finds himself navigating the sensitive territory of foreign cultural traditions.“What isthat."Ichigo follows his line of sight the best he can to a small metal pillar, eight winding arms branching off its base. It looks old, ornate almost to the point of being clunky.“A candelabra?” Something twists inexplicably in Ichigo’s stomach at look Grimmjow is giving this dull piece of metal.“That ain’t the word,” he mutters.
Relationships: Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 13
Kudos: 70
Collections: 🧡💙The GrimmIchi Server 2020 Secret Santa💙🧡





	Look at me, I swear by your God

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QTCutie (Qtcutie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qtcutie/gifts).



> a tad late for hanukkah, but i hope you like your present anyway ✨ big thanks to saramir for giving some much-needed feedback and to Q, just for being you ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ happy holidays!!!

They’re walking down the street when he first spots it - Grimmjow that is. Ichigo doesn’t even notice before someone bumps into his shoulder, pushing past him in the space where Grimmjow is supposed to be. 

Turning around, the arrancar appears to have vanished into thin air until the crowds of holiday shoppers shift to reveal him standing transfixed in front of a dingy thrift shop, completely unresponsive to the growing agitation of the people whose path he’s blocking. He doesn’t even acknowledge Ichigo before the man places a hand on his arm. 

“What is _that_ ,” Grimmjow asks without pausing his staring contest with the shop window. 

“I have no idea which item you’re looking at.”

The arrancar scoffs, always so reluctant to just use his damn words the way they’ve been trying to teach him to.

“That—” a frustrated nod towards the window pane, no helpful hand movements whatsoever. Ichigo follows his line of sight the best he can to a little pillar of metal, eight winding arms branching off its base. It looks old, ornate almost to the point of being clunky, something he imagines belonging in the too-full home of an elderly woman, not… having any value to Grimmjow, that’s for sure. 

“... candelabra?” he supplies, and receives no response. Something twists inexplicably in Ichigo’s stomach as he takes in the look Grimmjow is giving this dull piece of metal. 

“That ain’t the word,” he mutters eventually. 

The confused little furrow between his eyebrows that only grows deeper as the significance of that statement seems to catch up with himself, and then he’s off, speeding on down the pavement and leaving Ichigo to stare at the nine-armed candle holder inside the shop. He wonders idly if it’s made of actual gold, and remembers that actually, yes, the thing does have another name. 

“ _Oi_ , Kurosaki, ya gonna stand there all night?” Grimmjow’s voice is even more brusque than usual, a different shade of when Ichigo and his family take Grimmjow’s knowledge of ordinary human things as a given and the arrancar is disgruntled to prove them wrong. Rather, Ichigo has the strangest feeling that this is the _opposite_ of that. 

—

He comes back to buy it the next day, alone.

—

Initially, he goes for stealth, mostly because he has no idea how to explain himself to anyone in the household. He places the candelabra on a windowsill in the living room, behind the photographs already resting there, practically hidden. It lasts until Yuzu comes home from zumba.

“Karin-chan, did you buy this?” she asks not five minutes after entering. Ichigo freezes in the middle of doing the dishes. He can’t see into the living room from here, but-

“No, why would I buy something like that?” Karin replies and yeah, he’s gonna have to put this thing into words. “Isn’t that a Jewish thing?”

“Is it?” Yuzu’s voice asks, now coming from a slightly different place and a short sound of blunt metal scraping against wood tells Ichigo that she’s picked it up from the windowsill.

“Ichi-nii, do you know anything about this?”

—

He’d sort of steeled himself to be ridiculed, but his sweet sister takes it and fucking _runs with it_. Yuzu performs around twenty google searches in half as many minutes while his no-good sister sardonically asks if Grimmjow is circumsized. 

At the sight of his middle finger, she tells him that she wasn’t asking how long it is. 

She’s demoted from sister. Just a plain old no-good off the street. 

It is quickly determined that the eight days in question have not yet come to pass, although it’s _so much sooner than Ichigo thought it would be_. Why did he think it happened after Christmas? As Yuzu blasts off into the kitchen to attempt preparing a dish whose name she can’t even pronounce, Ichigo wonders what exactly he has set in motion. 

—

“UraharaShōtenwhatcanIhelpyouwith?”

“Hey, uh, I was wondering-”

“Oh, it’s you.” Jinta informs him in a considerably less enthusiastic tone. “Grimmjow’s busy.”

“I wasn’t asking for him,” Ichigo replies, although in a way he sort of is. Then, because it never fails to irk the kid, “I want to speak to your manager.”

“He’s busy with Grimmjow.”

“Ah... Right. Uh. Jinta, do you… would you happen to know if hollows retain memories from their previous lives?”

“What, you’re just now noticing this, dumbass? You thought it was just a fun coincidence that they go after their loved ones when they turn? Yeesh, those shinigami have pretty low standards.”

“ _No_ , I know— ugh,” Ichigo groans, rubbing at his face with his free hand and peeling through his fingers at the now incredibly shiny candelabra that Yuzu has placed in _front_ of the picture frames on the window sill. 

“I meant like… arrancar-level… hollows.”

“Course you did,” the little shit says, and Ichigo has absolutely no idea what his sister sees in him. “I dunno man, they’re literally thousands of souls at that point, wouldn’t that would be pretty confusing?”

It’s pretty much the same reasoning Ichigo had - it seems terribly inconvenient for all of them to reminisce all the time. It's so weird to think of Grimmjow as a conglomeration of different people. He just seems so _singular_. Would it do any harm to encourage him to maybe remember something... from his time in the living world? Ichigo knows he’s overthinking this, even as his mouth works to form a question about dominant souls and possible trauma, but Jinta beats him to it. 

“ _Hello?_ You’re holding up the line, dude, this isn’t a call center. If you’re not gonna order anything, then— Hey!” Ichigo hears some undeterminable rustling and a second voice that does not sound happy. “It’s not a freaking customer, s’just— I got it, okay—” 

Jinta’s voice grows distant as more suspicious noises pour out from his phone’s tiny speaker before suddenly going silent for long enough that Ichigo has to pull away and check if the call is still active. 

“Ah, good day, Kurosaki-san! You’ve called at a slightly inconvenient time, I’m afraid,” Tessai’s deep voice informs him. 

“Sorry, I was just wondering if, uhm. Grimmjow might—”

“That is a lovely idea, Kurosaki-san. We’d be pleased to get ri— that is, get your invitation to Grimmjow-san. I wish you a pleasant time together.”

Thus ends the helpful phone call. 

—

Ichigo informs his sisters that company is coming. Possibly. This matters a great deal to one of them, whilst the other only gives him the stink eye as she gets enlisted to kitchen assistant duty. The holiday culinary experiments are hidden away for now. 

Personally entrusted with setting the table, Ichigo finds himself slightly adjusting his mysterious thrifted treasure every time he makes the round from kitchen to dining table. 

He tells himself it’s unlikely that Grimmjow will even notice - Yuzu has the eyes of a falcon when it comes to her territory (Grimmjow loves this about her), but the decorative inanimate objects of the living world have never caught the arrancar’s fancy. Before, that is.

—

“Is that the one from the fucking shop.”

“Nnno? We’ve always had a, uh,” A word in another language, not unfamiliar, but never before uttered from his own mouth. As his lips form the syllables, he remembers hearing it in class, explained by a teacher who has as little experience with practical foreign religion as she did with living through the french revolution, or the south american wars of independence. Not unfamiliar, but distant and abstract and simply not relevant to his own life. 

“You’re saying it wrong,” Grimmjow says flatly, and provides Ichigo with the correct pronunciation without a second thought. It’s not overly different, mainly a matter of shifted emphasis, but it rolls off his tongue so naturally. 

By the time Grimmjow removes his gaze from the menorah and returns Ichigo’s stare, his hackles are already coming up, a jaw clenched tight and a pair of wide eyes willing him to not make a big deal out of it. Suddenly Ichigo is glad that Urahara wasn’t the one to pick up the phone. He might have provided him with more base information, but this would’ve surely been part of a deal to get some free data and Ichigo doesn't want Grimmjow to be any kind of guinea pig. 

It’s one of the most vulnerable looks he’s seen on the arrancar’s face. 

Ichigo carefully repeats the word, pronunciation around halfway between his first attempt and Grimmjow’s correction. 

It garners a scoff, and a softer expression. 

—

They’re honestly not sure whether he’ll show up on the first day, but as the last rays of sunlight are making their way up the walls, the door opens. The setting sun makes it seem like some kind of spell, a witching hour of gold rather than darkness that brings the arrancar to their doorway, blue hair turned to brass, haloed by the last death throes of sunlight. 

“The fuck’re you watching?” he asks Karin and stalks into the living room, sliding her effortlessly (but not roughly) to the corner of the couch with the push of a long leg. Ichigo doesn’t miss his gaze flickering briefly to the window, taking in the two thin candles resting atop the center and far-right branch. 

“High art,” Karin states boredly and grabs the remote before Grimmjow has a chance to. She unceremoniously tucks it into her bra and settles comfortably into the corner as if she’d meant to relocate there anyway. 

Ichigo paces into the kitchen and shoves one of Yuzu’s potato things into his face, for some reason more nervous than when he first let the former Espada into the very destructible home of his not very spiritually proficient sisters.

“Ichi-nii, I thought we agreed to serve those afterwards!”

“M’sowwy,” he says around his mouthful, “I just— are you sure you don’t wanna try reciting the prayers?”

“No way! I thought you were trying to memorize them?”

“My brain is a sieve,” Ichigo states after forcefully gulping down the latke. He swears he still feels it closing off his airways.

“Are we even supposed to say them when we aren’t… you know,”

“Someone’s supposed to,” he stresses, and they both look out at Grimmjow and Karin on the couch, casually listing the anatomical inaccuracies of whatever is happening on screen. It’s pretty dark outside already. 

“Do you think he might—”

“Not a chance in hell. You have the best shot at getting through this alive, Zuzu, he never gets pissed at you.”

His sister takes a long hard look at him and then resolutely holds out her hand. A slightly crumpled piece of paper is placed into her palm, and then she’s taking off her apron, striding out of the kitchen and removing the remote from her sister’s bra. Karin squawks a little at the immediate sensation, but makes no effort to regain the thing. The TV shuts off with a mute click and it is in fact very dark without the flickering screen, and very, very quiet. It feels like they’re about to do a fucking seance. 

“Would you like to light it, Grimmjow-san?” Yuzu asks calmly, and Ichigo is so proud of her. He leans himself against a wall, and just… stares at his guest. Tries to make his heart slow down. 

Grimmjow doesn’t move a limb from his slouch in the cushions, but Ichigo sees the way his muscles have tensed, knows his body well — in a certain way, at least. A practical way. It’s only practical to be able to recognize when your opponent is about to spring into attack. Yeah. And this exactly what Grimmjow looks like now, deceptively uninterested in his posture, whilst watching the branching metal like it poses a threat to his existence. 

He shakes his head slowly and looks instead towards Yuzu, the meaning clear enough. 

She nods, unfolds the piece of paper on which Ichigo painstakingly copied the three blessings. It’s a translation, and they have no way of knowing if it’s a good one, but Yuzu commands Grimmjow’s complete attention as she speaks the words. Next, she strikes a match. The small flame lights up her features from beneath in a way that makes Ichigo realize that his sister is much more woman and girl, with cheekbones and an elegant jawline replacing the cute babyfat that he’d kind of assumed would be a constant part of her features. 

Picking up the center candle, she slowly moves to light the one on the end. The flame is joined by another, her face better lit now and still completely calm, and Ichigo doesn’t even know what he was afraid of - that an ancient deity would spring from the flames and scorch them for doing this incorrectly? 

After a brief look at Grimmjow’s face, Yuzu brings the candle back to its central placement, and clasps her hands together in front of her waist. Even she looks a bit uncertain as to what’s supposed to happen now. 

For an indeterminable amount of time, they all just look at the two flickering flames, one slightly higher than the other. The tension seems to have left Grimmjow’s body, until Karin’s phone suddenly goes off and he sits up straighter than a kid who just got caught passing notes in class. 

Karin goes upstairs to take her phone call and Ichigo takes her place on the couch - or rather, the place where Grimmjow’s legs were previously sprawled out, sitting almost close enough for their thighs to be touching. Yuzu goes to claim the corner seat, and Ichigo touches Grimmjow’s knee to make him scoot over to make more room for her. 

Now their legs are touching, and Ichigo keeps his hand on the knee, and it’s so quiet and he still doesn’t know if they’ve done it well enough. He rubs a curious circle with his thumb, and Grimmjow sort of melts back into the cushions again, very gradually, as Ichigo’s other fingers lightly join in on the circular motion. 

It’s not an uncomfortable silence, but it’s far more reverent than what his household is used to. He turns his head to smile at his sister and she smiles back and touches the hand resting by his other side. They give each other a little squeeze. 

Eventually she gets up and heads into the kitchen to arrange the food he so rudely began stress-eating before its time. The sounds are a little jarring after the silence, but familiar and comforting, a welcome gradual return out of the solemn atmosphere. Grimmjow hardly seems to notice, growing more limp and heavy-lidded as he gazes at the remaining stumps of the candles. 

He looks close to dozing off when Yuzu brings in her tray of exotic holiday treats. They don’t particularly tempt him - human food rarely does - but he dutifully samples each one before leaving them all unfinished at the table. 

Yuzu takes this as a challenge. 

—

On the third night the menorah has been moved to a more esteemed location. The clutter which previously adorned the old chest of drawers has been cleared away and replaced by a long blue cloth that Ichigo swears he’s never seen before. On top lay several round ornaments that he would’ve previously connected with a Christmas tree, although they’ve never had one of those either. It’s an artful arrangement of blue, white and silver, matching some shades of the rice paper lamps that have also appeared around the living room. 

Grimmjow doesn’t comment, but no one really expected him to. 

The soft lighting of the paper lamps make the atmosphere less somber during the lighting ritual, although they make his and Grimmjow’s hand-holding less subtle. 

—

It turns out Inoue has a Jewish colleague and the pair join them on the afternoon of the fifth night to oversee Yuzu’s production of the delicious jelly doughnuts whose name Ichigo still cannot pronounce. The colleague corrects her technique and gives some pointers before heading home to celebrate with her own family. Inoue contributes by... eating the doughnuts, which now have a slightly different consistency. 

She also joins them on the following nights, because why the hell not at this point. 

She brings blue and silver streamers, and also Tatsuki, who in turn brings a beautiful spinning top and swindles Karin out of any loose change she had lying around. Grimmjow stares at the dreidel with watchful eyes, but stays put on the couch until Ichigo coaxes from him that he has no money to play. They offer to switch their currency to almonds, which Grimmjow predictably refuses to let them do, just as he refuses Ichigo’s offer to “lend him” any yen, ever angry and sullen when anyone goes out of their way to accommodate anything to his benefit. 

Ichigo agreeably lets him sulk on the couch alone, only offering a small smile the few times he catches him looking over the back of the couch. When he hasn’t caught him looking for an hour or so, he wanders over to find him sound asleep, his face soft and peaceful. 

—

On the sunset of the eighth day, Ichigo comes home from a second trip to get more of those golden chocolate coins to find that Karin has put on a holiday playlist of foreign music, more lively than what he expecting, although he really had no auditory concept of what this whole thing is supposed to be like. 

The music is gradually brought to mute when it’s time to light the candles, and Ichigo contemplates reminding Grimmjow that this is the last chance to be the one to light the candles, if he wants to, or making sure he doesn’t … I don’t know, say something meaningful. Ichigo manages to think the better of it before opening his mouth. 

The arrancar watches attentively, still tense and somewhat apprehensive as Yuzu speaks the words and moves her hands steadily from candle to candle, and Ichigo feels the same tension inside himself, although this has more to do with the fact that this is the last time and he’s not quite sure he’s ready for this thing to end. He wonders if Grimmjow feels a similar way. The last day should be the most special somehow, probably, and Ichigo knows they’ve pretty much butchered this from day one… but Grimmjow hasn’t once commented on how shoddy this little mock-up has been. 

_Next year_ , he finds himself thinking. _We’ll do it better next year_. He has plenty of time to learn the prayers by heart, to learn some of the songs too, maybe. Maybe Grimmjow will light some candles then. 

For now, Yuzu is almost finished, steady and graceful in her movements. Karin looks just as proud of her as he feels. 

As the last candle is returned to its rightful place, Grimmjow breathes out a slow breath and tilts sideways until his head is resting in Ichigo’s lap. Inoue turns around from where she’s sitting on the carpet, leaned against his bony legs, to send Ichigo a warm smile. She turns back to rest her head on Tatsuki’s shoulder and Ichigo admires them warmly even as he theads his fingers through Grimmjow’s hair. Wonders if the two of them could ever have it so easy. 

When he looks into his lap, he finds Grimmjow gazing up at him, not smiling and not frowning either. 

“K’saki,” he mutters from Ichigo’s lap, sounding already half asleep. “Thanks.”

“Happy Hanukkah, Grimmjow.”

**Author's Note:**

> to whom it may concern, the title is stolen from a very charming danish holiday song about interreligious relationships ❄️ i ved godt hvilken julekalender jeg snakker om her, kan jeg få en håndsoprækning fra j&j fansene lmao 🙌 jimmy jørgensen og grimmichi, mest ambitiøse crossover i 2020


End file.
